2 posts categorized "calories"

January 24, 2010

You can't see, taste or smell them, but you can't live without them. And you'll definitely know when you've had too many.

Registered dietitian Jill Weisenberger once had a client who kept a puzzling food journal. The calorie counts were all out of whack. The woman's tuna sandwich had 33 calories. An apple: 144.

Turns out the woman was mistaking a food-calorie book's index for a calorie chart.

Few common health words are as baffling to us as "calorie." Calories are invisible, yet we try to count them and cut them. Food supplies them, but they're not nutrients.

"They're abstract," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, who says calories are "a mess" to explain. "Ordinary mortals cannot count, see, taste, smell or feel a calorie," she said.

January 06, 2010

It turns out calorie counting isn't as easy as it seemed. Some commercially prepared foods contain more calories than the labeling indicates, according to research published in the Jan. issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

In the most extreme cases, some restaurant foods and frozen dinners purchased at grocery stores contained up to twice their stated calorie content. Overall, however, restaurants averaged 18 percent more calories than the stated values. Frozen meals averaged 8 percent more.

Even more distressing, perhaps, is that the Tufts University researchers also found that free side dishes at some restaurants actually have more calories than the entrees.

One reason for the unreported calories could be that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration monitors whether companies are skimping on calories. For example, they don't want the food to contain 90 calories when the package says 100.

But "the regulations do not prosecute overproviding as readily," said lead investigator Susan Roberts, the director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts’s Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. "So manufacturers stay out of trouble by putting more in the package than they admit to on the label."

Roberts came up with the idea for the study after a first-hand experience while researching her new book, "The 'I’ Diet," an instinctual approach to eating. When she cooked at home she lost weight. But when she ate the "same meals" at restaurants, she lost nothing.

"Dieting all day and losing no weight was very frustrating," she said. "So when we saw restaurants and supermarkets really do give you more calories, I adjusted my no-cook menus to make them work."

Roberts says calorie counting in general is difficult--even exercise equipment routinely miscounts calories--and often is ineffective. She believes it's impossible to suppress our biological instincts regarding food; instead we need to redirect our food instincts to help us. I'll post some of her tips shortly.